“Isn’t that your silver car I saw parked out front?”
“One of them.”
The location, the corridor of an upmarket hotel. Posing the question is Cheryl, a beautiful model wearing the perfect little black dress.
Equally expensively attired – his bespoke three-piece suit an exact match for that of Sean Connery as James Bond – is a young man, Frank Abagnale. And yes; the silver car in question is an Aston Martin DB5.
The flirtatious verbal jousting pans out as we, the viewers, expect. Frank asks for Cheryl’s autograph. In return, Cheryl asks if he has a pen in his room…
And yet nothing is quite as it seems. Frank Abagnale is a handsome 19-year-old conman, cashing skilfully forged cheques and living his best life while impersonating Pan-Am pilots, doctors and even a Louisiana prosecutor. He’s only ever one step ahead of a pursuing FBI agent.
That’s the story of Catch Me If You Can, a Spielberg movie based on the autobiography of Frank Abagnale Jr. With Leonardo di Caprio as Frank, Tom Hanks as FBI agent Carl Hanratty, and a stellar supporting cast including Christopher Walken, Martin Sheen, Nathalie Baye, Amy Adams and James Brolin, it was released in 2002 to commercial and critical success, grossing $352 million globally.
In the film, Frank is secretly delighted when the newspapers start to call him ‘The James Bond of the Sky’ and starts to model himself on Sean Connery’s version of agent 007. Hence the silver DB5, which we briefly see him blasting through crowded Manhattan streets with impressive disregard for the rules of the road.
The DB5 in the film was supplied by Autosport Designs of Huntington Station, New York. It was owned for four decades by fashion photographer Theo Gruttman, custodian of four classic Aston Martins. With its 007-lookalike Silver Birch over Red specification, one of just 193 left-hand drive examples, it was factory-fitted with Selectaride adjustable rear shock absorbers and a Powr-Lok limited-slip differential. In 2003 the matching-numbers engine was rebuilt with an enlarged displacement of 4.2 litres, performance camshafts and triple Weber carburettors. Following Mr Gruttman’s death in 2020, the DB5/1715/L went under the hammer at an RM Sotheby’s auction in Phoenix, Arizona. The film’s provenance and its outstanding condition helped it to sell for $797,000.
But how true was the ‘true-life’ story of Frank Abagnale, anyway? Over the years many of the claims in his book were debunked, though he did impersonate a Pan-Am pilot for a brief period in the autumn of 1970. He seems to have been less successful as a forger than he’d claimed; neither did he work as an advisor to the FBI following his arrest. Erotic encounters with supermodels in upmarket hotels were mere artistic licence. Ditto the DB5.
And yet if his best-selling autobiography and the acclaimed movie that followed were not based on a ‘true story of a real fake’ as the posters described it… doesn’t that make Frank Abagnale a brilliant conman after all?
